Hell is Us: War and emotional distance

Hell is Us is a recent action adventure video game, with an emphasis on puzzles and exploration. I really like the game, but this is not a review.  See other sites for reviews. I am here to discuss story and themes.

Hell is Us is about war. But it’s not some high fantasy war, disconnected from reality. It’s a flat out genocide.

It takes place in the fictional country of Hadea, geographically isolated from the rest of the world. There are two religious groups, the Paloms and Sabinians. After years of forced resettlement, racist propaganda, a vote for Sabinian indendence, and so much more, the country has erupted into violence. The Sabinian army now is attempting to eradicate the Paloms. Even otherwise sympathetic characters, even young children, often express hatred for the other side, viewing them as less than human.

Paloms and Sabinians have a history that deliberately evokes Catholics and Protestants. But whether intentional or not, there is ~another~ genocide that very strongly comes to mind.

The player character is Rémi, who was born in Hadea but escaped as a small child. He never fights any humans, instead only fighting the demonic invasion that the war seems to have provoked. He is a heroic character, often helping civilians, and even saving lives. But as for the war itself, he mostly gives it the silent protagonist treatment, giving space to the player to have their own emotional reaction.

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Confession

I left Catholicism when I was 18, so I literally have a child’s understanding of the Catholic practice of confession. It was a ritual that did not make much sense to a child.

What is confession? It’s one of the seven sacred sacraments, the other six being eucharist, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, annointing the sick, and baptism, in some order. Catholic Wednesday school, known as CCD, is supposed to introduce kids to three of the sacraments, namely eucharist, confession, and confirmation.

Confession was essentially a scheduled annual obligation. One day, all the kids would quietly line up for a little private chat with one of the priests. And just to paint the picture, we always talked to priests face to face, we never used confessional boxes, ubiquitous though they are in fiction.

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Computer difficulties

Story time.  So the other day, my computer crashed and then it wouldn’t restart.  I’m not much of a hardware person, but my brothers are, so I spent a long phone call with one of them opening it up and inspecting the hard drives.  The hard drives are fine.  Great.  It’s probably a software issue, and the Windows installation was corrupted.

Anyways, I decide it would be easier to bring it into a shop rather than fixing it myself.  I put it in a suitcase and roll it over to the repair shop across the street.  I tell them Windows needs to be reinstalled, and they say they’ll take it in for advanced diagnostics.  It’s free, provided that I register as a member–so actually it’s not free, it’s $60.

A few days later and they say it’s fixed.  Not diagnosed, fixed.  They say that they needed to reinstall Windows, which is what I had said.  So I roll the computer back to my apartment, and guess what?  The computer works, but the hard drive is wiped.  Specifically, just one of the two hard drives was wiped, the other hard drive is fine.  It’s just… that was the hard drive I was using.

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Link Roundup: September 2025

My PC is out of commission right now, so no origami this month.  Still got a handful of links.

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults | Ozy Brennan – When we talk about Rationalist cults, no we’re not describing Rationalism itself as a cult, we’re talking about specific groups of people with isolationist and dysfunctional social dynamics.  Such as the Zizians, a trans vegan cult that recently murdered a landlord.  Ozy interviews former members to get a sense of what they were like and where they went wrong.

Many of the cults seem to have had a practice of exhausting multi-hour sessions, where they would read far too deeply into minor domestic behaviors.  That… really reminds me of Barefoot Bum’s description of the Kerista Commune (the cult known for coining “polyfidelity”).  It was not a Rationalist group at all, but had institutionalized a very similar practice.

Videogame politics for a burning world | Unwinnable – An interview with Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who offers an interesting perspective on climate change.  He frames climate change not as a future apocalypse, but rather as a thing that is happening right now–“all the things you hate about the present getting worse and then being stuck that way”.  Since this is a video game periodical, the latter half of the interview turns towards video games, and their role in climate change.  We have to ask, is the extravagance of large commercial video games necessary?

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Hating the artist, hating the art

(Disclaimer: to the extent that this article was inspired by a specific creator, it’s not a creator you’ve heard of, and not one that I mention anywhere in the article! I mention a few authors as examples, but I was not setting out to specifically comment on any of them.)

When a creator falls into disrepute, there tends to be a public re-evaluation of their work. “Oh, I re-read their book, and it’s aged terribly.” “I’ve always thought their work was bad.”

This is reminiscent the story of sour grapes. In the Aesop’s fable, a fox tries to eat some grapes, but cannot reach them. So the fox says the grapes were sour anyway, and he didn’t want them. So when an artist falls from grace, people can no longer wholly enjoy the art. So they say that the art was never good in the first place, and nothing of value was lost.

But there is a major difference between the fox’s re-evaluation of the grapes and the public’s re-evaluation of the art. The “public” is made up of more than one person. There may be some individuals who first liked the art, and then stopped liking it. But more often, what happens is we first hear from individuals who liked the art, and then later we hear from another set of individuals who did not like the art. Perhaps no individual re-evaluation took place, and it’s just a matter of listening more to the haters.

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Selling out as a game dev

Moon Garden Optimizer is now listed on Steam. You can still play the game in browser for free on Itch.io, but the Steam version will be paid and have expanded content.

Moon Garden Optimizer is a puzzle strategy game about growing a garden while conserving water. It’s the only strategy game I’ve seen that lets you undo as much as you like. Wishlist on Steam!

Moon Garden Optimizer capsule

Ahem.

So I’d like to discuss the decision to put the game on Steam, and also sell it for money. Selling out, as it were.

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What is identity?

I run an annual survey, and we’re always asking about sexual identity.  We include some options that are more obscure than most people are used to.

Something I occasionally hear in feedback, is people saying it takes a long time to answer, because they have to look up identity labels that were unfamiliar with. Or people will say they’re not sure they identify with a term, because they don’t know what it means.

I have to admit, I find this response baffling. If there is a word that you do not recognize, then we can say with 100% certainty that you do not identify with the word. How could you?
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